RF Power Amplifier, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10Integrated Inductors

10.1 Introduction

There is a great demand for on-chip integrated inductors with a high quality factor. Capacitors can easily be integrated in CMOS technology using polysilicon layers, resulting in high capacitances per unit area. One of the largest challenges in making completely monolithic integrated circuits is to make high-performance integrated inductors [1–56]. Lack of a good integrated inductor is the most important disadvantage of standard integrated circuit (IC) processing for many applications. Front-end radio-frequency (RF) ICs require monolithic integrated inductors to construct resonant circuits, power amplifiers, impedance matching networks, bandpass filters, low-pass filters, and high-impedance chokes. RF IC inductors are essential elements of wireless communication circuit blocks, such as low-noise amplifiers (LNAs), mixers, intermediate frequency filters (IFFs), and voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) that drive cellular phone transmitters. Monolithic inductors are also used to bias RF amplifiers, RF oscillators, tuning varactors, PIN diodes, transistors, and monolithic circuits. The structure of planar spiral inductors is based on the standard CMOS and BiCMOS technologies as the cost is one of the major factors. Applications of RF IC inductors include cell phone, wireless local Network (WLN), TV tuners, and radars. On-chip and off-chip inductors are used in RF circuits. There are four major types of integrated RF inductors: ...